Evan Yurman: The Blacksmith

The jewelry designer talks blackened steel and pirate's gold.

Today is not a great time to be in the men's jewelry business. Or you'd think that, anyway, what with the belt-tightening, the priority shifting, the bottom-line watching, and all the rest of the gloom and doom that might give a sober man pause before purchasing another watch or a new pair of cuff links. So how is it that Evan Yurman, the 26-year-old designer of men's jewelry at David Yurman and the son of the famous jeweler, has seen his business grow by double digits?

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Let's start with how he got into the business, which wasn't part of some dynastic succession plan but rather the unplanned result of a swing through upstate New York in 2002. "On a walk in the woods in Piermont," Yurman says, "I ran into a blacksmith near his house, and he had this amazing handmade knife. We got to talking and eventually he invited me to learn how to forge a knife. 'But,' the blacksmith said, 'before you learn how to make a knife, you need to make 200 coat hooks, because everything you need to know about making knives is in one of those hooks.' So I spent the next eight months with him making coat hooks. And sometimes I just felt like making a really, really nice one, and I would spend half an hour banging away and perfecting it, but the blacksmith was against that. He didn't like perfecting things."

The blacksmith's roughhewn way won out and continues to influence Yurman's collections, which he started designing for his dad's company in 2004 and which range in price from the low hundreds well into the thousands. Bracelets and pendants in titanium and blackened steel, rings and cuff links encrusted with tiny black diamonds or adorned with talismanic motifs like Athena's shield and Egyptian scarabs — even among his more polished pieces, there's something of the anvil about them. And while many of his competitors concentrate on the cut of their stones or the gleam of their metals, Yurman concerns himself principally with form. "Jewelry always started with the form, and almost all the shapes that we use in modern jewelry stem from ancient jewelry. The key to all jewelry is in the ancients."

By this he means the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and medieval pieces, garnered from all sorts of places, that make up much of his personal trove of historic jewelry: minute oxidized-iron Roman rings that would barely fit a 21st-century child's finger; chunky medieval merchants' gold rings with their rich symbolic turtles; and thumping great bands of gold, weighing a pound each, banged into rudimentary bracelets for 18th-century merchant traders in the East Indies who knew that the only way to safeguard one's wealth on the high seas was to wear it. Yurman collects anything and everything that catches his eye and houses the assortment of weird, fabulous, and downright beautiful objects in industrial map chests in the company's Manhattan headquarters, taking them out frequently to inspire and inform his own designs.

"I like things that have a real history," he says. "Especially since everything in our culture is so plasticky and transient." Put another way, he likes stuff that lasts and lasts and lasts, and if his recent sales figures are any indication, so do a growing number of American men.